A panel of six management and economics professors Rosemary Batt (Cornell University), Peter Cappelli
(Wharton School), Richard A. D’Aveni (Dartmouth College), Martin Kenney (University of California, Davis), Thomas A. Kochan (Sloan School of Management); and Raghuram Rajan (International Monetary Fund), joined Professor Sara L. Rynes (University of Iowa) for a discussion about WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT THE EXPORT OF JOBS ABROAD?. The panel addresses a variety of questions including:

It seems you can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine these days without reading about the outsourcing or exporting of work from the United States to other countries. Have the political and media reactions to these phenomena exaggerated their significance to the U.S. economy and workforce?

It would seem, then, that we do not know as much about the current situation as we would like to know. At the same time, certain features of the world economy, as it becomes increasingly globalized, are fairly clear. We do know that the world’s developed countries constitute just a small fraction of the world’s workforce and that the means of exporting jobs to the less developed world is far greater than it was just a decade ago. Some analysts contend that the ill effects of globalization for U.S. workers will be only short-term, but economist Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote, in Business Week, that the huge excess supplies of labor in India and China mean that American wages will fall a lot faster than Asian wages will rise for a long time. Do you agree?

The focus of our discussion, of course, has been the effect of offshoring on the United States and other developed economies. But what about the other side of the equation? In India, workers in jobs most affected by offshoring — software engineers, customer service agents, claims processors — number about one million in an economy of 400 million workers. Given this small percentage, how significant to India or China is the exporting of jobs from the developed world? Would US or European restrictions on offshoring or foreign investment have dire effects on these countries?